While Matt Reeves' 2022 film, Oz Cobb, AKA The Penguin, a dreamer and a schemer who has his eye on the prize: becoming the king of crime in Gotham.

The Penguin is a show about villains, but that doesn't mean Oz Cobb doesn't have allies. For better or worse, much of his story is motivated by his allegiance to his mother, Francis, played by Deirdre O'Connell. Meanwhile, the show opens with him taking street urchin Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) under his wing as something of an apprentice. According to showrunner Lauren LeFranc, these characters were introduced as a way to articulate The Penguin's character and thematic journey through the criminal underworld.

At New York Comic Con 2024, Screen Rant interviewed showrunner Lauren LeFranc and actors Deirdre O'Connell and Rhenzy Feliz. LeFranc spoke about picking up where Matt Reeves left off and filling in the world of The Penguin around its eponymous protagonist. Feliz dove into his character's unlikely companionship with Cobb, and O'Connell shared how much of her character's personality is articulated through her particular sense of old-school gangster moll style.

Showrunner Lauren LeFranc On Crafting Gotham's Underworld Around The Character Of The Penguin

"I wanted to dig into Oz and who I thought Oz was, and who I think should be in his world."

Screen Rant: Did Matt Reeves hand you the keys and you got to go build Gotham's underworld? Tell me a little bit about the process of creating this world.

Lauren LeFranc: Well, for me, I started by asking Matt a ton of questions. Getting to read his script was super informative. Eventually, he showed me the first 40 minutes of the film and I got to see Colin's portrayal, which was really inspiring. And then I just dug in and did a lot of research and wanted to figure out how to service the movie. I knew we would start a week later. And then I wanted to dig into Oz and who I thought Oz was, and who I think should be in his world, who we should meet, how we should meet them, how they help the viewer to better understand him and his journey.

And then from there, just try to build out his world. You know, his mom was very important because I think so much of his journey is rooted in his mother. That was something that I decided early on. Then it's like, "Who are the potential antagonists?" Obviously I knew that Falcones already existed, and the death of Carmine created a power vacuum. We heard about Salvatore Maroni in The Batman, but we never got time to meet him. So that felt right and then it made a lot of sense to me to introduce Falcone's children. Obviously in the comics, there's Mario, Alberto, and Sofia, and Mario does not exist in our world. So I established Alberto and then Sofia, and knew that Sofia would take a bigger trajectory in the show.

Oz is obviously the protagonist, but he's not exactly a hero. Tell me about creating this world where there are no heroes, but you still want to follow these characters. I think that applies to Oz and his relationship with his mother. You understand his damage in a certain way, that you can kind of want to see him get what he's after, no matter how many people he's got to kill on the way, and likewise with Sofia.

Lauren LeFranc: We tried to have no heroes or villains definitively in the show, and I think Batman is not directly a hero or a villain in a lot of ways, too. And that's what's so fun about this universe, no one's so black and white in that way. But empathy. Just as a writer, I need people to empathize with someone. I don't want them to necessarily accept what they do and think that that's fine, because no one on our show is a particularly great person. I think Victor has the most heart of anybody.

But everyone's complicated, and they're flawed, and that's the beauty of this universe and this world, and then it just takes work trying to navigate that and make sure that we're keeping the characters as engaging enough as possible, so when they're doing something terrible, maybe you love that they do that, because it depends on who they're doing it to. And in other moments, you can be disgusted by what they choose to do. But as long as you're interested in them, that's, to me, all that matters.

In The Batman, we got to see Gotham from the rooftops; from Batman's point of view. And to him, everything is "the other." And now we have characters who are from the streets, who suffered directly as a result of the flood. Tell me a little bit about the production design and just how this broken Gotham fuels the story and characters.

Lauren LeFranc: Matt and his film already established that Gotham is pretty broken, and then the fact that we inherited the terrible flood that happened shows Gotham in a very different state. It's so much more upside-down, even more than in the movie. That's why it was important for me to showcase Victor's neighborhood and highlight Crown Point, so you can really empathize and understand the flood's damage on a personal level and the cost of what the Riddler did to the people of Gotham. It's a great thing to have the time on television to show Gotham City, to show it in the daytime, to show the way people live. I wanted to showcase that, for Victor's neighborhood in particular, it's full of life. There are good people there. They just don't have as much money. That doesn't mean they're criminals. That doesn't mean they're bad. That was very important to me.

The Penguin's Deirdre O'Connell On Francis Cobb's Immaculate Fashion Sense

"s has the TV on and she's watching Gloria with Gena Rowlands..."

Mrs. Cobb has a particular sense of glam.

Deirdre O'Connell: "Mrs. Cobb," I love that. She does have a sense of glam! She has gold fingernails all the way through the show! Gold!

Tell me about her sense of glam.

Deirdre O'Connell: She has a much stronger sense of glam than Dee Dee does. I'm just dressed particularly fancy today for the occasion. I wear a t-shirt and blue jeans and I wear my hair in a hat most of the time. She's got a really particular sense of glam. It's something that wasn't actually clear from just reading the script, how exactly that would sit, where that would fall, and I owe a lot to Helen, the costume designer, who is a genius. She and I spent hours and hours going through all this stuff that she thrifted. Like, it could have gone anywhere. She could be wearing, like, a little pleated skirt and a Peter Pan collar when we first started, or she could be wearing that sequined gown, that purple sequined dress at home.

When we found that, it was actually a brown sequined dress that she found at the thrift store. And when she found that and I put it on, it was like, (Gasps) oh, okay, here we go. And she was like, I'll make it purple, and this will be her core outfit. And from there, you know, we'll build out from there, Francis's sense of herself. There's a scene in the show where s has the TV on and she's watching Gloria with Gena Rowlands for a second. When we were thinking, like, what did Francis want to look like in the 80s? What did she feel like was her thing? And of course, we're in Gotham and we're in, who knows when. And it was that kind of gangster woman. That was the look she was working when she was younger. And now she's found herself here. Her sense of glam includes a lot of animal prints. There's a lot of glitter involved. There's gold nails involved. She does her bangs. She does her hair.

The Penguin's Rhenzy Feliz on Victor's Unexpected Kinship with Oz Cobb.

"Maybe if we can pull this massive thing off, maybe I have a chance of being something, being someone."

Tell me a little bit about Victor hitching his horse or so to someone like Oz. Your character is a quasi-willing participant. What goes through his head, in deciding, "Yeah, I'm going to hang out with this guy?"

Rhenzy Feliz: I think it's a tough one. There's a million different things going on to end up with one singular decision, which is to stay. Some of it has to do with the way that he just, he enjoys Oz as a human being. At the end of the day, I think he really likes him. I think he finds him kind of funny. He loves his confidence. When he walks into a room, maybe he wants a little bit of that for himself, you know, in himself. Money, honestly is another incredibly incentivizing factor for people who don't really have enough of it.

Don't I know that!

Rhenzy Feliz: I think he sees a better life for himself. Apart from all that, he's lost a lot, just recently. Finally, he has someone who actually gives a shit about him and who cares about him. And I think he feels that, sees that, decides, "I can be a part of something that's bigger than just me." Whatever road he was on, it probably wasn't going to lead to the greatest of outcomes. But here with Oz, he thinks, I've got someone who cares about me, and maybe if we can pull this massive thing off, maybe I have a chance of being something, being someone. I think a bunch of these things go into that decision.

Tell me a little bit about playing someone with a speech impediment, which relates him to Oz on a certain level. Oz notices and thinks, "Hmm, he's a little like me." And how he grows in confidence as the show goes on.

Rhenzy Feliz: Yeah, he definitely grows in confidence, but I don't think that necessarily has anything to do with the amount that he stutters or not. I think that was one of the things we wanted to capture. I think there's a misconception that, as you get more confident, you lose your stutter. For a lot of people, that's not true at all, it has nothing to do with the confidence. Yes, Victor does gain confidence over the series, of course he does, from being around Oz and getting things done. But the stutter was always something that we wanted to pay close attention to and never make fun of it.

We wanted to be honest about it, try to get into an organic space, which is something that me and Marc Winski, my "Speech Consultant," was the technical title. He was the guy who helped me. He was my dialect coach, essentially. We worked on it as much as we possibly could before we started shooting. And then, throughout the entire shooting process, he was there every day as well. It meant something to the story, but I think it also meant something to a lot of people around the world who also have that disability.

More About The Penguin Season 1

Starring Colin Farrell as The Penguin, the eight-episode DC Studios drama series continues The Batman epic crime saga that filmmaker Matt Reeves began with Warner Bros. Pictures’ global blockbuster “The Batman,” and centers on the character played by Farrell in the film. The first look was revealed today exclusively during Warner Bros. Discovery’s unveiling of the Max streaming service on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles. The previously announced cast includes Colin Farrell, Cristin Milioti, Rhenzy Feliz, Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Deirdre O’Connell, with Clancy Brown and Michael Zegen recurring.

Check out our other NYCC 2024 interviews here:

• Dune: Prophecy Cast & Crew
• The Penguin's Cristin Milioti & Michael Kelly
• The Penguin Cast & Crew
• Cross Cast & Crew
• Lumina Director
• Jason Blum on Blumhouse 2025 Slate

New episodes of The Penguin air Sundays on HBO at 9pm ET.